


Untitled

by Seirissi



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Car Accidents, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Injury Recovery, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Other, POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-19 02:55:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19966870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seirissi/pseuds/Seirissi
Summary: 1st person narrative original short story. Car accident, injury and drug use/abuse mention.





	Untitled

One foot in front of the other.

Step by step.

I watched him learn to walk again.

It had been months since the accident. It felt like a blur, but I remembered it was late, it was raining hard, threatening a real storm and the night black and starless, save for the wash of colour as neon and streetlights melted into one another on that busy city street. He hated the sound of the rain now. He couldn’t stand to listen to it even for a moment. I missed the days when that was all we did; lying in each other’s arms, everything silent except the rain. Now the sound of it tore open half-healed wounds anew.

After the accident, everything changed between us. He stopped smiling first. I had sat by his bedside every day, willing him to recover so that we could get back to normal. He still talked to me then, but his voice already sounded hollow and distant, and so very sad, like something had fundamentally broken in him on impact.

The doctors told him he was lucky to have survived, but that seemed to only bring him pain.

Soon, the time between moments when he’d speak to me began to stretch out. When he did speak, his words had hard, angry edges and I began to think he resented my very existence, or that he blamed me for what had happened to him.

I convinced myself it was just part of his recovery. That he’d bounce back and be his usual self sooner or later, so I kept trying to talk, to laugh, to make things better, but he slipped further away with every passing moment.

By the time they let him come home, he had begun to ignore me more or less entirely. Instead, he’d shut himself away, turning to the painkillers he’d been given, but soon even that comfort wasn’t enough. Days slid by into weeks in silence, interspersed with outbursts of anger. I cried myself to sleep, feeling like a shadow in my own home. I thought if he wouldn’t talk to me, maybe he would fight me, but my screams fell on deaf ears as he walked out or drifted further into chemical oblivion every night. Maybe he’d be happier if I left, but I could never seem to find the courage to do so. I needed him, and I was afraid of what he might do to himself if I left him alone.

Eventually, I stopped trying to get through to him. There was peace, but it was the uneasy passivity of two souls existing in the same space, though never really connecting anymore.

Don’t ask me how long things remained in that limbo. I couldn’t honestly tell you. It could have been days, weeks, months. Time just became utterly irrelevant by that point, and every time I watched him slip under, I held my breath, listening carefully for his, counting them until he woke up again, terrified of the moment they might stop.

One day that nightmare came true. I’d sat beside him like some morbid guardian angel as he lay sprawled across dirty bedsheets. I started counting as I always did, but momentarily got lost in noticing that he’d gotten paler and thinner than I remembered. Whether it was the drugs or that he’d just neglected to eat properly recently, I don’t know, but he looked so tired and frail, exhausted to his bones.

I can’t say how long truly passed before I realised his ribcage had stopped rising and falling, but it hit me like a punch in the gut when I saw that his lips were blue. I panicked, trying futilely to wake him but he felt as heavy as stone and didn’t stir in the slightest.

I lay my head on his chest and heard nothing. My own heart (or what was left of it after all this time) broke in that moment, and all I could do was break along with it, curling up beside him as hysterical sobs wracked my body. I cried until nothing more that came from me were wet hiccuping sounds.

And then he said my name.

He was standing on the other side of the room, a momentary flicker of confusion etched on his face. I had a matching expression since his body was still in bed next to me.

As his confusion bloomed into relief, mine remained briefly before I was pulled back to that rain-soaked night, the Semi and its driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel T-boning into my side of our car at the intersection, crushing it beyond recognition, though leaving the rest relatively intact. I remembered rain on my face and the blur of colours before everything slipped away from my senses.

The relief in his eyes brought me back from that sour reverie, and if I felt any sadness that either of us was dead, I left it with his body as I stood, crossing the room in an instant and collapsed into his arms in floods of tears that he was acknowledging my existence again.

I didn’t feel alone anymore, and neither did he.


End file.
